Form Of Hierarchical Structure Research Articles

Developing the practice of pre-service physical education teachers through a dyad model of lesson study

This article reports on a dyad model of lesson study aimed at scaffolding the theory and practice of learning to teach physical education. Participants were pre-service teachers (PSTs) completing a 38-week Master’s-level Postgraduate Certificate in Education in eastern England, training to teach the secondary age range (11–18 years). A total of 40 PSTs volunteered to participate in the study during their school-based training. A three-year cross-sectional case-study framework involving three distinct cohorts of PSTs allowed for a comparison of data, captured through computer-mediated communication. Dialogue through email communications and electronic evaluations was analysed inductively. Three substantive themes were identified as a result of the PSTs’ experiences: (a) developing confidence in the classroom through collaboration with a peer; (b) developing physical education pedagogies to support students’ individual learning needs; and (c) developing physical education pedagogies to support assessment of students’ progress. The dyad lesson study model provided a safe and non-hierarchical platform for collaboration between PSTs. Peer-to-peer reflection on aspects of their own practice instilled confidence and enhanced understanding, particularly in relation to understanding students’ individual learning needs to promote progress and assessing such progress. Dyad lesson study positively supported PSTs’ professional development against prescribed Teachers’ Standards beyond the formal hierarchical rules and structures associated with the school-based training process. Such collaborative conversations can help to minimise professional isolation for PSTs during their school-based training and address the juxtaposition of connecting the theory of learning to teach with a holistic view of student learning in practice.

Artistic Freedom or the Hamper of Equality? Exploring Ethical Dilemmas in the Use of Artistic Freedom in a Cultural Organization in Sweden

AbstractWith this paper, from the perspective of ethics at the workplace, we problematize the taken-for-granted assumptions embedded in the use of artistic freedom in creative processes. Drawing on the notion of inequality regimes (e.g. Acker, 2006) and using empirical material from a performing arts organization in Sweden, we explore how the assumptions of artistic freedom facilitate and legitimize the emergence of inequality regimes in invisible and subtle manners. Our findings indicate that non-reflexive interpretations of the concept of artistic freedom result in ethical dilemmas that impact the organization's pursuits of equality work. The aesthetic ethics oriented around the notion of ‘art for the sake of art’ tends to camouflage the centralization of aesthetic authority in processes where formal hierarchical structures are missing. Consequently, asymmetrical power relations between the Directors, actors, and producers are legitimized. Ethics of quality of art and that of the social ideal of equality have been constructed as dichotomic notions indicating that aesthetic ethics of art can only be preserved at the expense of social objectives of equality. We argue that the current interpretative practices of ‘artistic freedom’ in some cultural organizations add little value of ethics to the freedom of expressing artistic opinions and in achieving the social ideal of equality but lead to the emergence of inequality regimes in the artistic work processes.

The Double-Edged Sword of Leadership Task Transitions in Emergency Response Multiteam Systems

Multiteam systems (MTSs) operating in complex and dynamic environments often have a formal hierarchical leadership structure. However, it is unclear whether individuals should stick exclusively to ...

The Role of Spatial Organization in Resurrection City and Other Protest Camps

Social and political organizing and organization has a spatial dimension, and there is increasing interest in academic studies of organization to understand better how space and organization relate, interact, and conflict. There is a range of studies that look at business and workplace organization, but little evidence from social movement organization or what is sometimes referred to as alternative organization studies. This article addresses this gap by observing and analyzing the effects of spatial organization in social movements. It focuses particularly on protest camps, a form of social movement organization in which spatial organization is particularly important. It looks at the Resurrection City protest camp of 1968 to identify the development of spatial organization practices. They are carried onwards across social movements, as they resolve organizational desires for the social movement organization, such as enabling mass organization without resorting to formal membership or hierarchical structures. In summary, the article provides insight into the relationship between spatial and social organization.

Efficiency measurement for hierarchical situations

The measurement and monitoring of the efficiency of processes in organisations has become an important undertaking in today’s competitive environment. A fundamental tool for this undertaking is data envelopment analysis (DEA). The conventional setting for DEA views the decision-making unit (DMU) (school, hospital etc.) as a black box with inputs entering and outputs leaving. The current paper looks at a problem setting somewhat related to a multistage situation but pertaining to a particular form of hierarchical structure. Specifically, we examine a set of electric power units that act as sub-units or sub-DMUs, operating under the framework of set of power plants that play the role of DMUs. We develop a DEA-like methodology that evaluates, in a two-stage manner, both the efficiencies of the sub-units and of the aggregates of those sub-units (the plants). In so doing, the approach attempts to have the projected values of plant-level inputs and outputs match up with the corresponding aggregate values of the sub-unit projections, as is the case prior to projection to the frontier. Since such projections may in fact not match up as described, we introduce a goal-DEA methodology to minimise the extent of any failure to achieve this match up.

Organizational antecedents of exploration and exploitation in SMEs

PurposeScholars have recognized that formal hierarchical structures and slack resources are at the core of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) attainment of ambidexterity. Surprisingly, few studies on SMEs have analyzed the extent to which these structural and resource attributes are associated with exploration and exploitation. This study aims to examine how two structural attributes, formalization and structural empowerment, and two resource attributes, financial slack and human resource slack, affect exploration and exploitation in SMEs.Design/methodology/approachData were gathered from a survey administered to the chief executive officers of 522 French SMEs. The research hypotheses were then tested using seemingly unrelated regressions to investigate the contrasts between the two components of ambidexterity.FindingsThe results show that structural empowerment and financial slack may be conducive to exploration and exploitation at the same time. By contrast, formalization and human resource slack impact only one of these two ambidexterity components in significant ways: the former may be a powerful lever for exploitation, while the latter may be a powerful lever for exploration.Originality/valueRelying on a dual structure–resource perspective, this study allows us to discuss the distinct impacts that several organizational antecedents have on exploration and exploitation in the specific context of SMEs. It thus addresses the recent call to identify which antecedents are integrating and which are differentiating to help firms deal with ambidexterity.

Thomas Ellweins »Der Staat als Zufall und als Notwendigkeit«

Abstract Rüdiger von Krosigk’s re-reading (Relektüre) of Thomas Ellwein’s The State as Coincidence and Necessity (Der Staat als Zufall und als Notwendigkeit, 1993/1997) explores the concept of »living administration« in the Prussian region of East-Westfalia-Lippe in the 19th and 20th century. Ellwein’s approach seeks to overcome those top-down perspectives on public administration that mainly focus on formal hierarchical structures and nurture the idea of »rationality« in the activities, functions and development of public administration. By contrast, his history of public administration draws inspiration from empirical administrative sciences, organisation sociology and historical institutionalism. Even 20 years after publication it is still an invaluable source in the field of administrative history.

The Honest Leader Effect - How Hierarchies Affect Honesty in Groups

Every organization rests on some form of hierarchical structure. We experimentally study how different organizational reporting hierarchies influence dishonesty of group members. Group members report the outcome of a private die-roll to their group. Group members get payoffs, only if all three reports are identical. We vary the reporting hierarchies, i.e., whether all subjects report simultaneously, as in flat hierarchies, or sequentially, as in steep hierarchies where one person, the leader, is asked to report first. We observe what we term ‘the honest leader effect’, as the levels of dishonesty are highest in flat hierarchies without a leader. In additional studies we investigate into the driving forces of ‘the honest leader effect’ and show that the fact that leaders behavior is exposed to the group triggers image concerns, which in turn lead to more ethical outcomes. Our study offers a new view on the effect of hierarchies on ethical outcomes and the role of psychological factors on leadership behavior. Existing studies that focused mainly on the effect of leadership on group behavior, we shift the focus on how the leadership role can influence leader’s behavior.

Hierarchical topic modeling with automatic knowledge mining

Traditional topic modeling has been widely studied and popularly employed in expert systems and information systems. However, traditional topic models cannot discover structural relations among topics, thus losing the chance to explore the data more deeply. Hierarchical topic modeling has the capability of learning topics, as well as discovering the hierarchical topic structure from text data. But purely unsupervised models tend to generate weak topic hierarchies. To solve this problem, we propose a novel knowledge-based hierarchical topic model (KHTM), which can incorporate prior knowledge into topic hierarchy building. A key novelty of this model is that it can mine prior knowledge automatically from the topic hierarchies of multiple domains corpora. In this paper, the knowledge is represented as the word pairs which satisfy the requirement of frequent co-occurrence, and knowledge is organized in form of hierarchical structure. We also propose an iterative learning algorithm. For evaluation, we crawled two new multi-domain datasets and conducted comprehensive experiments. The experimental results show that our algorithm and model can generate more coherent topics, and more reasonable hierarchical structure.

World art as an External Equaliser

Using a Swedish performing arts organisation as a case study, we examine how the assumptions of creative freedom enable and legitimise the establishment of inequality regimes in imperceptible and nuanced ways, drawing on the concept of equality regimes (e.g. Acker, 2006). Our research shows that when the idea of creative freedom is interpreted without reflection, ethical difficulties arise that have a negative effect on the organization's aspirations of equality. When formal hierarchical structures are absent, the aesthetic ethics based on the idea of "art for the sake of art" may serve as a smokescreen for the consolidation of aesthetic power. This validates the existing unequal power structure between directors, performers, and producers. Aesthetic ethics of art have been framed as opposed to the social ideal of equality, suggesting that the former must be sacrificed in order to protect the latter. We contend that the current interpretive practises of "artistic freedom" in some cultural organisations lead to the development of inequality regimes in the artistic work processes, while adding little value of morality to the freedom of conveying artistic opinions and in accomplishing the social ideal of equality.

The Third Man: hierarchy formation in Wikipedia

Wikipedia articles are written by teams of independent volunteers in the absence of formal hierarchical organizational structures. How is coordination achieved under such conditions of extreme decentralization? Building on studies on the organization of dominance relations in animal and human societies, we theorize that coordination in Wikipedia is made possible by an emergent hierarchical order sustained by self-organizing sequences of text editing events. We propose a new method to turn the editing history of Wikipedia pages into an evolving multiplex network resulting from three types of interaction events: dyadic undo, dyadic redo, and third-party based edit events. We develop new relational event models for signed networks that specify how the probability of observing various types of edit events depends on their embeddedness in sequences of past edit events. Using a random sample of page histories comprising 12,719 revisions produced by 7,657 unique users, we examine the relation between theoretically defined sequences of text editing events, and the emergence of linear dominance hierarchies that regulate production relations within Wikipedia. We find evidence that dyadic interaction gives rise to systematic extra-dyadic dependence structures that are partially consistent with a hierarchical interpretation of the Wikipedia editing network. We support and complement the statistical analysis of multiplex event networks with data visualizations that provide qualitative validation of our main results.

Construction of Hierarchical Cognitive Academic Map

Nowadays, mobile devices have been considered as a new platform for information services, and have been widely used in many fields. In mobile application services, the processing and representation of data is a key issue which has a great impact on the service quality. Knowledge map is regarded as an effective method and has been widely utilized in mobile devices. However, traditional knowledge maps employed in mobile devices are subject to a lack of cognition characteristics, which results in corresponding information services’ being unable to match the users’ cognition level, thus affecting the quality of services. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical cognitive academic map (HCAM) for the specific academic domain application background. HCAM can meet the needs of three basic levels of Bloom’s cognition taxonomy model by distinguishing the academic attributes of nodes and relations between nodes. First, academic concepts are the basic units in HCAM and are classified into research object concepts and method/technique concepts, which meet the human’s remembering cognition levels. Second, HCAM provides the implementation and collaboration relation between concepts, which satisfies the human’s applying and understanding cognition levels. Third, technique/method concepts are organized in the form of hierarchical structure from the top down of which concepts’ specificity for the domain get higher and higher. In addition, Bayesian rose tree clustering is adopted in the construction of this hierarchical structure and acquiring the cognition depth for each concept. Furthermore, experiments on information retrieval field and data mining field are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness and cognition characteristics of HCAM.

Cultivating Empathy: New Perspectives on Educating Business Leaders

Beyond rules, procedures, and manuals lie relationships. Jettisoning a formal hierarchical company structure allows all levels of management and employees to positively interact – this is where the key driver of “empathy” is so critical to continue building these relationships and molding a common organizational purpose.

Allocation of Clusters of Objects on Topological Graphs of High Cardinality

Distributed systems containing hundreds or thousands of objects, are generally constructed in the form of hierarchical structures. In these structures, the lower level objects in the subset are combined for connecting to centers. Existing algorithms are not able to successfully meet the challenges of structuring on the sets of such dimension. Therefore, new algorithms suitable for solving the problems of structuring on the sets containing thousands of objects are necessary. The authors developed an algorithm to form objects clusters for high cardinality sets, with up to a thousand or more objects located in a given area. The algorithm is developed with the help of graph theory, design and analysis of algorithms efficiency, compact partitions theory, compact sets of objects and their clusters. Geographical location of a set of objects of a distributed system is considered as a topological graph. To improve the efficiency of the algorithm of forming compact sets and clusters allocation the concept of the zone of active search for nearby vertices is introduced. That enables the possibility to replace a matrix of distances between the vertices to list of vertices incidents formed on the basis of active search zone. An algorithm for the approximate solution of clusters allocation of topological graph objects represented by a list of vertices incidents is developed. The algorithm recurrently increases the cardinality of compact sets for each object and analyzes acquired clusters. Algorithm description is accompanied by an example.

Corruption and the Architecture of Paramilitary Bureaucracies: Comparing the American and the Russian Police

Despite institutional change, corrupt networks have been tremendously successful enterprises at the expense of the public good; returning and evolving with new elements. For public sector corruption to prosper, bureaucracies must possess certain structural characteristics which facilitate criminal behavior. Although public organizations have been largely studied, it is less clear how their structure creates opportunities for deviance. Given the understudied field of paramilitary bureaucracies and the deleterious consequences of corruption for socioeconomic development and (inter)national security, we seek to understand: “How and why does the structure of police organizations facilitate corruption?” To address this question, we draw upon organizational, covert networks, and organized crime theories, and test them using a conditional uniform graph test on a dataset that includes the formal hierarchical structures of the modern police forces in Russia and the United States. We show that despite operating in largely different institutional regimes, the Moscow and the Los Angeles police department exhibit similar structural characteristics. Police bureaucracies’ structures are efficient in performing complex tasks, but are highly conducive to concealment, creating numerous temptations and opportunities for corruption. Lastly, we show that police organizations are scale-free networks which makes them extremely vulnerable to corruptive pressures.

Realizing the Need for Rework: From Task Interdependence to Social Networks

Design rework is a core phenomenon in new product development (NPD). Yet carrying out design rework presupposes recognizing the need for it. I characterize the types of interpersonal knowledge transfer that help developers realize the need for design rework in NPD. As predicted by the NPD literature, I find that individuals who interact frequently with colleagues to address their task interdependences are more likely to realize the need for rework. I also learn that interacting with colleagues who have different expertise in process‐related knowledge (as opposed to product‐related knowledge) facilitates realizing the need for rework. However, to develop a deeper understanding of how individuals recognize the need for rework when interacting with others, we must expand our views beyond task interdependence and expertise‐related factors. In particular, organizational variables—both formal and informal—play a significant role. With respect to formal hierarchical structures, actors of superior rank are less likely to realize the need for rework regardless of whether or not their interacting partner is of superior rank; however, actors of superior rank are more likely to trigger realizing the need for rework when interacting with partners of subordinate rank. By examining an organization's informal structure, I discover that the social “embeddedness” of developers (i.e., the energy and attention invested in a dyadic relationship) significantly influences their propensity to realize the need for rework. Several hypotheses are tested in a sociometric study conducted within the development department of a software company, and I discuss the implications for behavioral operations in NPD.

Realizing the Need for Rework: From Task Interdependence to Social Networks

Design rework is a core phenomenon in new product development. Yet carrying out design rework presupposes recognizing the need for it. We characterize the types of interpersonal knowledge transfer that help developers realize the need for design rework in new product development (NPD). Although realizing the need for rework might initially be perceived as negative (since it triggers the repetition of tasks that were once considered finished), it is ultimately positive because the resulting (corrective or completion) actions lead to higher-quality products. As predicted by the NPD literature, we find that individuals who interact frequently with colleagues to address their task interdependences are more likely to realize the need for rework. We also learn that interacting with colleagues who have different expertise in process-related knowledge (as opposed to product-related knowledge) facilitates realizing the need for rework. However, to develop a deeper understanding of how individuals recognize the need for rework when interacting with others, we must expand our views beyond task interdependence and expertise-related factors. In particular, organizational variables - both formal and informal - play a significant role. With respect to formal hierarchical structures, actors of superior rank are less likely to realize the need for rework regardless of whether or not their interacting partner is of superior rank; however, actors of superior rank are more likely to trigger realizing the need for rework when interacting with partners of subordinate rank. By examining an organization’s informal structure, we discover that the social 'embeddedness' of developers (i.e., the energy and attention invested in a dyadic relationship) significantly influences their propensity to realize the need for rework. Several related hypotheses are tested in a sociometric study conducted within the development department of a software company, after which we discuss the implications for behavioral operations in new product development.

Biomimetic Materials in Our World: A Review.

The study of biomineralization offers valuable and incredible insights into the scope and nature of material chemistry at the inorganic and organic surfaces. Biological systems (architecture) are replete with examples of organic supramolecular assemblies (double and triplet helices, multisubunit proteins, membrane- bound reaction centres, vesicle, tubules e. t. c.), some of which (collagen, cellulose and chitin) extend to microscopic dimensions in the form of hierarchical structure, There are ample opportunities of lessons from the biological (on growth and functional adaptation), and physical (properties and compositions) world. This review explores the field of biomimetic material chemistry as it relates to fibres with respect to their historical perspective, the use of the products of biomimetic material, the progressive efforts and a general overview. Conclusively, biomimetic materials research is indeed a rapidly growing and enormously promising field that needs to be explored.

The Strength of Collective Processes: An ‘Outcome Analysis’ of Women’s Collectives in India

Mainstream literature on organising usually assumes formal hierarchical structure, clear lines of reporting, supervision and well-defined rules as mandatory for efficiency and efficacy. Rigid rules could, however, negatively impact involvement, satisfaction, motivation and performance as they would not take into consideration the complexities of human behaviour. This article argues that collective or non-hierarchical organising empowers the individual participants involved in the process, but such organising experiments are rare and seldom documented. The article analyses a few women’s collectives from around the country, particularly focusing on Bailancho Saad, in Goa, which turned 25 years old on 12 October 2011. It also draws on the experiences of Saheli in New Delhi and Forum in Mumbai, both of which are older. These organisations, ideologically opposed to hierarchy as well as patriarchal and dominating power structures, work for women through seemingly egalitarian processes and ‘participatory’ styles of functioning. In this article we look at some of the strengths of collective organising by analysing their outcomes.

A new method for automatic synthesis of tolerances for complex assemblies based on polychromatic sets

In computer-aided tolerance design (CAT), integrated design of dimensional and geometric tolerances is still one of the research hotspots. Polychromatic sets theory (PST) is a new mathematic tool, which is especially suitable for formal hierarchical structure models. Based on PST, in this article, a new hierarchical representation model for tolerance synthesis is presented to realise integrated design of dimensional and geometric tolerances. According to the inference relations between unified and individual colours of PST, the synthesis matrices of variational geometric constraints (VGC) are established in the VGC tier of the model, and the synthesis matrices of tolerance types are established in the tolerance type tier of the model. On this basis, the synthesis processes from the feature tier to the VGC tier and from the VGC tier to the tolerance type tier can be realised. VGCs, which are achieved by the synthesis matrices of VGCs, can be combined together to establish a well-constrained VGC network (VGCN). Tolerance types, which are achieved by the synthesis matrices of tolerance types, can be added to the well-constrained VGCN to construct a well-constrained tolerance network. An application example is given in the article to illustrate the synthesis steps.